SHORT STORIES: Let's Be Alone Together: An Anthology of New Short Stories Edited by Declan MeadeThe Stinging Fly Press, 213pp. €12.99
CURIOUSLY, THE short story triggers more anxious apologetics than any other genre. On the one hand, its affinity with a lost world of oral performance seems to mark it out as faintly outmoded. On the other, its fragmentariness taxes readers who can more readily get to grips with the rounded worlds of the novel. In Ireland, the legacy of so many unsurpassed practitioners, including James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, William Trevor and John McGahern, makes tackling this mode a daunting enterprise.
Why then does the short story continue to flourish? This is one of the questions considered by Declan Meade in his preface to this collection of short stories by first-time and established authors.
The answer he provides is ultimately an aesthetic one. The importance not of word count but of "making the words count" was the mandate issued to would-be contributors in the initial call for submissions to this collection. It serves also as a succinct account of the perennial fascination of the short story. As with the sonnet, its brevity is a challenge for the author. Likewise, its circumscription acts as a stimulus for the reader who has to spend as much time imagining what the short story omits as what it delineates.
Above all, the modern short story revels in the paradox that it rarely sets out to tell a story at all. It regularly follows a plotless arc and loosely tracks significant moments or transient states. The most accomplished and memorable stories in this anthology are in this vein; they evoke marginal characters and peculiarly off-kilter states of being. In The Meaning of Missing, Evelyn Conlon explores the emotions of a prickly woman whose sister has emigrated to Australia. The modulating ironies of this poised narrative capture the quirkiness of her viewpoint and the tangled feelings that underpin her relationship with her husband and her sister. Danny Denton in An Attempted Resurrection shows how a seemingly familiar world is thrown off balance when a football player fails to resuscitate a team member who suddenly collapses at a game. The crude banter and enforced camaraderie in the dressing room at the start of the story are nicely counterposed with the feelings of devastation that overwhelm the protagonist at the end. Rosemary Jenkinson in Scenes from an Empty Attic and Gina Moxley in Cuts trace the experiences of women who struggle with disappointment but still manage to experience a sense of pleasure that is as unexpected as it is unalloyed. Tellingly, several of the narratives in this volume take a Gothic turn. Violence and psychosis are shown to be inherent aspects of the modern worlds that they depict. In Mia Gallagher's Polyfilla, a woman vengefully attacks a supercilious man whom she has encountered at a party as she recognises his similarity to her abusive husband. The voyeuristic heroine of Viv McDade's Soul Mate turns into a malevolent stalker, while the sexual exhibitionism of the protagonist of Dónal O'Sullivan's After Benny rapidly become the basis for mutual aggression and menace. Breda Wall Ryan's macabre The Egg Collector captures the anguish of infertility in tracking a woman's determined descent into madness as she gives birth to phantom children that are more real to her than the actual baby she eventually bears. D Gleeson's Daragh Maguire and the Black Blood begins as a seemingly commonplace story about a man's grief on the death of a brother and unexpectedly mutates into a chilling vampire tale.
There are glancing references to current social and political problems such as racism or the war with Iraq in this volume. But, revealingly, most of these stories, even though they use a recognisably modern setting, concentrate on fundamental aspects of the human condition and painstakingly create scenarios that acquire a potent symbolic resonance. A woman's one-night stand in Helena Nolan's beautifully modulated A Hare's Nest obliquely points to the back story of the heroine's anguished search for her missing son, a little boy's daring excursion to the top of a hill near his grandmother's cottage in Jim O'Donoghue's affecting Carson's Trail is revealed to be an attempt to ward off the horrifying knowledge of his father's death, and the slow demolition of a house by the mysterious Mr Washington in James Lawless's Brown Brick becomes a fitting metaphor for the destructive drug addiction of its central characters.
Declan Meade has made astute choices in selecting these stories, which waylay the reader with surprising revelations and insights. Let's Be Alone Together attests to the vibrancy of the Irish short story and to its flexible capacity to render the foibles of human behaviour and the disorderly randomness of modern life.
Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce studies at University College Dublin. She is editor of the Irish University Reviewand co-editor with Luca Crispi of the forthcoming Dublin James Joyce Journal